The screen, always Bergman’s supreme medium, is proof of the power of her magnetic and energetic presence. It shines through in even the grainiest, jumpy, out-of-focus home-movie footage.

All of the participating directors – save Balsmeyer and actor Natalie Portman – are known for features. So part of the interest is seeing how the short form puts their strengths, weaknesses, thematic interests or styles into sharp focus.

How do you make a movie about shallow people in a shallow culture and not end up with a shallow movie? For writer-director Sofia Coppola, the answer is to dramatize a story “based on actual events,” then to step back and present it as a case study in pure anthropology.

Gleeson and Wilson deliver tightly-wound performances, while the ending is more chilling, and perhaps perplexing, than audiences might expect.

The cinematic equivalent of a "good read" - pick it up and you can't put it down; put it down and it's gone forever.

Though Babel lacks any tragic sense of inevitability, it almost compensates with a handful of vibrant performances and the palpable physical texture of the settings.

The interest here is about watching Hardy, bouncing off Gandolfini and the other cast members, as a quiet man who has turned being underestimated into his primary survival skill. And all the while we wait for the moment when Bob the puppy grows into Bob the pit bull.

Poison, low-budget but with all-human actors, is dark and funny and has something very powerful to say about society and how it applies irrational stigmas to those who do not conform to an often arbitrary status quo. [12 July 1991]

Arabian Nights is a remarkable achievement, but also an erratic one.

The film as a whole, beautifully drawn and gracefully set into balletic motion, teaches a few welcome lessons regarding ecology and racial tolerance. [19 Nov 1988]

Though Candy greatly underplays Jack Chester, a beet-red seer-sucker summer renter, his genial humor and collaboration with Reiner make Summer Rental a small pleasure. [12 Aug 1985]

For all its contrivance, it's lively and amusing and occasionally disconcerting in its reproduction of what life was like in the mid-to-late teens.

Labelling his film as a response to the impoverishment of ordinary people caused by the government-imposed austerity of 2013-14, Gomes explains his dilemma brilliantly at the start of Volume 1. How is a well-meaning filmmaker to effectively render the pain of the Portuguese with a documentary set in a town where the shipyard has closed just as alien wasps are attacking local beehives?

Whether Omar will ultimately serve to change or harden hearts remains ambiguous, though it’s a movie that’s entertaining enough to appeal to the kinds of ordinary kids we see in the movie.

Yes, it’s really complicated, life with the Rizzos. City Island probably has too many moving parts. Still, writer-director Raymond de Felitta (Two Family House) understands that a proper farce, like a good campfire, needs plenty of friction to get started.

A surprisingly tender look at San Diego Comic-Con.

Director Richard Benjamin has found a quintessential comic premise for young adults in the eighties: a couple purchases a house. The Money Pit is elaborately physical, but in the manner of Buster Keaton pictures, with some scenes reminiscent of those charmed moments when an entire wall would collapse on the hapless Keaton, but our beloved "stoneface" happened to be standing just where the opening for a door was. [26 Mar 1986, p.C10]

You might be ready to throw a rock through your screen. Now it would be cool if Gibney could turn his attention to how the Canadian provinces messed up, too.

The fluffmeister here is writer-director Ol Parker, and say this for young Ol: This may be his feature debut, but the guy is one hell of a smooth engineer.

At least by Hollywood's conservative standards, Mother proves that the wayward son is alive and well -- softer in manner but still a subversive at heart. [10 Jan 1997, p.C1]

Lawrence and Cooper have electric chemistry, and the director pulls off one of the most satisfying romantic Hollywood endings seen in years.

The movie could have used a further dose of the resonance Walken gives it, and a more intellectually adventurous director might have brought the theme close to home.

It’s not that Blaze lacks tension or focus – it’s simply that Hawke is more fascinated with passion than profile. And here, that’s more than enough.

Gomes believes we should all take responsibility for one another and sees austerity as a government abrogation of social duty that ultimately turns citizen against citizen.

The Water Man myth feels incomplete. What is magical, though, is the chance to root for a young Black male hero as he navigates a family crisis that’s both specific and universal, and not based on race.

The work is more muted than Miyazaki’s more fantastical films, but visually complex and gorgeous, from the rustic mountain scenes to the urban scenes and soaring aerial views.

If "The Great Wall" felt like Yimou was turning his greatest hits into something dispassionately bland, then Shadow takes the familiar and makes it feel startlingly new.

As usual, the Coens' visual elements are pristine. The contrasting colours in the fire-lit interiors are gorgeous, while cinematographer Roger Deakins keeps the camera close, resisting traditional panoramic views.